Cigarettes and Happy Ever Afters.
by North1
Summary: Challengefic. Cordelia thinks about life, smoking and Angel.


Disclaimer: I own nothing, and make no profit from this. Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy own all.  
  
Author: North  
  
Title: Cigarettes and Happy Ever Afters.  
  
Summary: Cordy angst. One day I'll write something happy, I swear. Still, new genre = yay.  
  
Author's Note: From Challenge in a Can: Cordelia / Desiring / Cigarettes.  
  
Rating: R  
  
Spoilers: Pretty much Season three so far, to be on the safe side.  
  
She exhales a cloud of smoke, idly rolling the remaining couple of inches of cigarette between her fingers, and wonders when the atmosphere around the hotel got so thick with tension that even she began to skulk in the shadows, or in this instance, in a corner of the courtyard.  
  
It's not that she's ashamed of the smoking, not really. Everyone has their weak spots, right? God knows there are enough of them amongst the 'gang' lately.  
  
Wesley shunted out of their lives for the bits of Watcher taint he never quite managed to shake off, Fred and Gunn so sickeningly soft-eyed at each other that they probably wouldn't notice an impending apocalypse.  
  
Angel. Loss and guilt and pain and so much darkness she could almost reach out and touch it. Or him. And she wants to. Maybe would do, if it wasn't for the fear. Fear of the curse…what a tired sentence, used over and over, worn out and torn over bloodbuffystained years. Fear that he would push her away, crush and hit and tear, because she wasn't here when it happened, and in her absence she is judged. Would she have been the one to notice? To see Wesley so intent on research he wasn't sharing?  
  
Probably not, but they will never know for sure.  
  
The feeling is still there (Groo couldn't wash it away), disguised as friendship, for so long, stretching between them, but is it a bond or a chain? It feels like the latter, and she is so tired.  
  
Tired of always being the one to bluntly state the truth (except about that one secret, never about that), because the rest of them wouldn't, and then they couldn't, and always looked to her. Tired of being the one to force Angel to be a man (so ironic she almost laughs, but that would be too like the old her, and they only want the new improved model), trying to make him talk to her, to be his friend, and now she hasn't got a choice. Can't leave him, not just because of the visions (hello, telephone?), but because, afraid as she is of staying in the shadows with him, she has learned to hate the sun, for what it represents. Life, which burnt her at every opportunity. People who shunned her when she walked amongst them without Daddy's credit cards. The only acceptance found with a demon/man/demon who looks at her now with tears and childhood in his eyes, asking her why. Why they took his son. And she can't do as she used to (as Sunnydale!Cordelia, still Queen C, would have), maybe as she should do, and tell him the truth, harsh bitter truth of death (even of lawyers) and vengeance and two hundred years that will never be paid for, no matter what the prophecies dictate. Yet more revenge in the guise of hope.  
  
No, she can't say that, so she relented, and held him (unafraid, uncaring, when did she become unable to distinguish demon from man? Were they always so intertwined?), whispers condolence and sweet lies that taste bitter on her tongue (fake happily ever afters), and pretended not to notice as he inhales unneeded breath against her hair.  
  
She cut it the next day.  
  
She runs her hand through it now, leaning back against the crumbling wall, and inhaling deeply.  
  
Of course, she picked up the habit from Angel, not long ago; during the stage when they thought they were going to lose him (he never smoked before, not in LA, only when he had been Him, back in Sunnydale, he told her with a twisted smile), just before the firing, and the lawyers. They hadn't talked then as frequently as they did now, but every so often he'd crack slightly, talking angrily (not at her, never at her those times) or at certain moments almost gleefully, gesturing and chain smoking. So unlike him, she remembered thinking, in those almost frantic movements, and manic grin. She had realised how close Angelus had been to the surface. Those were the times she hadn't carried the lion's share of the conversation, but she hadn't considered it a victory. Because there had been no desire to run. The tie to him was there, even then, though she hadn't recognized it for what it was (boss, friendship, save my friend). So she sat with him, walked with him, and she took cigarettes when they were offered. When he came back he was different and the same. Quiet again, but joked, brooded but moved on slightly. Didn't wither away when Buffy ceased to be part of the living and breathing and the fighting of the good fight (never forget Doyle, belonging to the past when things were simple).  
  
She missed the past, childhood in Sunnydale (sandboxes, swing sets and bloodstains in the park), when the instinct to run was well ingrained, as if they were all still hunter-gatherers.  
  
She knows she'll never run now, not from him.  
  
He still smokes (shades of Angelus), even after Connor was born (not around the baby, Cordy!), and now Conner was gone it seems like he never stops. She tasted it on him during the ballet-ghost fiasco, nicotine and peppermint with a telltale metallic edge.  
  
She glances across the courtyard, to the gate. It's sunlight (not in the shadows, doesn't like it on her skin), daytime, nothing's stopping her. She could walk out, never look back, and phone in her visions to Fred or Gunn.  
  
She never will. Can't imagine a world without him anymore, a world in the light.  
  
Can you love and hate at the same time? He's taken her freedom, hid it away in his tortured soul, where she's afraid to venture to deeply, because she's never get back out, and worse, never want to. He's becoming her world, what she breathes in (smells of blood and regret, and lately, baby powder), and causes her to exhale the remnants of her old life. They share addictions, nicotine and each other. One they can't give up, and the other they don't dare to indulge (curseandhappiness anddeathandundeath).  
  
Is this what being in love is like? Wanting, desiring, resenting and hating?  
  
She stubs out the remains of the cigarette and lights another, fumbling for a moment with the packet hands shaking. Jitters.  
  
She tried to explain the concept of cigarettes to Groo, but it didn't float. 


End file.
